I heard the barricade scraping back into place on the other side of the door. Light falling out into the hall slowly died away as they pushed the door almost closed. I looked into the crack they’d left open, and Leilah looked back at me. Her face and her gaze were utterly cold. I turned away and set off down the long dark hall, to the great curving staircase at the end. I held my candle out before me, moving cautiously forward in its pool of sane, normal, yellow light. There wasn’t a breath of air moving in the hallway to disturb the candle flame.
Not a sound anywhere, apart from my footsteps. They sounded a lot heavier, realer, than Sylvia’s had. But I was worried they also sounded just a bit tentative. I didn’t want Sylvia to think of me as weak, as prey. I sniffed the air. I could smell faint traces of blood and decay on the air, ghostly traces from a disturbed grave.
I stopped at the foot of the long sweeping staircase. I held the candle high, and its light showed almost half the stairs clearly enough. No sign of Sylvia anywhere, which left me no choice but to go up and look for her. I started up the stairs, maintaining a steady pace, in the hope that would make me sound confident. Like I had a plan, instead of just a broken walking stick in a sweaty hand. I had faced some scary things in my time, in my various hidden pasts, but never anything like this. As Jeeves said, it wasn’t the thought of being killed that was so bad. It was the not staying dead. Of coming back as a walking corpse, with a never-ending need for blood and horror.
There were still faint traces of blood and decay hanging on the air ahead of me, from where Sylvia had walked up and down these steps before, taunting us. I clung to the thought that if I could smell her presence now, when I hadn’t been able to before, that had to mean she wasn’t influencing my mind.
When I finally got to the top of the stairs, I was breathing hard and my legs were trembling. I still held the candle steadily. I stepped out on to the landing, and Sylvia was immediately right there before me. No warning, no movement; just standing in front of me. Smiling her awful smile, her eyes shining horribly brightly in her rotting face. I almost jumped out of my skin. It had been a long time since anyone had been able to catch me by surprise. Sylvia hovered at the very edge of the candlelight. One step back and she would have been hidden in the dark. She wanted me to see her. So I just looked her over, quite calmly.
She smiled, her mouth stretching impossibly wide, her discoloured skin splitting apart, to show me even more teeth. Her lips still had Jeeves’ blood smeared across them. But there were too many old bloodstains sunk into her ragged burial clothes for me to tell what was fresh. What was his. Up close, the vampire stank of slaughter and the grave.
‘My, what bright eyes you have, Sylvia,’ I said. ‘Why couldn’t I see them before, in the dark?’
‘Because it is my nature to go unnoticed, until I want to be seen,’ said Sylvia. Her dead voice still had the power to make me squirm and shudder inside. ‘Unlike you, dear Ishmael, I am always in control of myself.’
‘You’re nothing like me,’ I said. ‘If you were really in control, I wouldn’t be able to see you at all.’
‘What are you, exactly?’ said Sylvia. ‘I can’t seem to … grasp you. You look human, but you aren’t. You’re different.’
‘You have no idea,’ I said.
‘So what are you?’
I shrugged easily. ‘Not from around here.’
‘You’re scared,’ said Sylvia. ‘I can smell the sweat on you. But you don’t need to be scared, Ishmael; not yet. I promised you … I’ll kill all the others first. I’m saving you for last. For dessert.’
‘Not going to happen,’ I said. ‘You have to get past me, to get to them.’
‘You think I can’t?’ Sylvia laughed softly; a slow, satisfied sound.
And then she lunged straight at me, just as she had at Jeeves. But I was prepared, and I leapt straight at her. I thrust the candle into her face, catching her by surprise. She paused a moment to slap the candlestick away. It hit the wall and fell to the floor, still somehow miraculously burning, giving me just enough light to see by. I punched Sylvia in the head with all my strength and felt, as much as heard, her skull crack and break and cave in. Sylvia rocked back on her feet, half her face collapsed in on itself. She struck out at me with a clawed hand, and I ducked under it. I could feel the disturbance in the air just above my head. I brought the wooden stick up, to drive it through her chest, but she sprang back immediately, out of my reach, almost disappearing out of the light and into the dark. She stood her ground, hissing at me like a cat. And I could hear the broken bones in her head creaking and rasping as they put themselves back together again.
Her stench was almost overpowering now, up close: the smell of blood and slaughter about to happen.
And then she turned and vaulted over the banisters, jumping all the way down to the hall below. I grabbed up the candle from where it had fallen out of its holder, sheltering the flame with my hand, and hurried over to the banister to look down. Sylvia was still falling, gentle as a leaf. She landed easily in the hallway, graceful as a cat. She didn’t make a sound. Just looked up at me, and smiled, and moved silently down the hall. I shouldn’t have been able to see her in the deep dark gloom, but she wanted me to.
I ran back to the top of the stairs. Sylvia was still drifting down the hall, silent as any ghost. She stopped before the drawing room door. It was almost closed, just a thin slice of light falling out into the hall. For whatever reason, Leilah wasn’t there, watching. Sylvia considered the door carefully, and then knocked: three quick, and two hard and slow. She had been listening.
There was the sound of furniture being dragged back, and then the door swung inwards and Leilah looked out, expecting to see me. Sylvia lunged forward and slammed the door open with one hand, and I heard the barricade beyond the door collapse and fall backwards. Leilah stepped forward and shot Sylvia repeatedly in the face. It didn’t even slow the vampire down. Sylvia grabbed Leilah’s head with both hands and ripped it off. I cried out, but Sylvia didn’t even look back. Leilah’s body slumped slowly, to sit on the floor, blood pumping and jetting from the ragged neck stump. Sylvia held the head right up before her rotting face and smiled happily into Leilah’s still rolling eyes. The mouth tried to say something, until Sylvia stopped it with a kiss.
The vampire threw the head aside, and it bounced and rolled away down the dark hall and out of sight. Sylvia leant over the headless body, thrust her face into the still-spurting stump, and drank greedily. And then she stood up, wiped at her dripping mouth with the back of one hand, and strode forward into the drawing room.
In the time it took for all this to happen, I jumped over the banisters and dropped heavily through the air. I braced myself as best I could. I seemed to hang on the air for ages, and then I slammed into the floor, hard enough to crack the wooden boards. The impact knocked the breath out of me for a moment, and I dropped my candle. The light had gone out anyway. But I still held on to my wooden stick. I ran down the hall and back into the drawing room.
And all the way, I could hear Sylvia laughing.
When I burst through the open door, Khan and Penny had retreated all the way across the room, to stand with their backs pressed against the far wall, facing Sylvia. Khan had smashed up a chair, with some last desperate strength, to make a wooden stake from one of the chair legs. Penny had one of the other legs, and she threw it at Sylvia with all her strength. The vampire slapped it easily aside.
‘You killed my daddy, and my mummy, you bitch!’ yelled Penny. ‘I’ll find a way to kill you!’
‘I never get tired of hearing that,’ said Sylvia. ‘Warms my old heart … But better than you have tried, Penny my sweet, and I’m still here, and they aren’t. Now, hush and hold still. It’s feeding time. You don’t want to leave an ugly corpse for whoever finds you, do you?’